Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2009/335

Related-Key Rectangle Attack of the Full 80-Round HAS-160 Encryption Mode

Ewan Fleischmann and Michael Gorski and Stefan Lucks

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the security of the encryption mode of the HAS-160 hash function. HAS-160 is a Korean hash standard which is widely used in Korea's industry. The structure of HAS-160 is similar to SHA-1 but includes some improvements. The encryption mode of HAS-160 is defined similarly as the encryption mode of SHA-1 that is called SHACAL-1. In 2006, Dunkelman et. al. successfully broke the full 80-round SHACAL-1. In this paper, we present the first cryptographic attack that breaks the encryption mode of the full 80-round HAS-160. SHACAL-1 and the encryption mode of HAS-160 are both blockciphers with key size 512 bits and plain-/ciphertext size of 160 bits.

We will apply a key recovery attack that needs about 2^{155} chosen plaintexts and 2^{375.98} 80-round HAS-160 encryptions. The attack does not aim for a collision, preimage or 2nd-preimage attack, but it shows that HAS-160 used as a block cipher can be differentiated from an ideal cipher faster than exhaustive search.